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Technology Stocks : Altaba Inc. (formerly Yahoo) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (14404)	10/8/1998 12:14:00 PM
From: Chuck Molinary	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 27307

William, Thanks for all your pertinent info to this thread. Since you appear to be the resident expert perhaps you could answer a question? Much comment is made regarding the number of pageviews recorded in a given period. I'm curious how those numbers are derived. Does Yahoo internally count and report the number of times its sites are hit? Or does a third-party somehow provide the data? I ask because if Yahoo is the one providing the data what prevents them from "cooking" the numbers? Television ratings are estimated by parties outside the networks (e.g., Neilsen). NBC, CBS et al don't claim that 144 million people watched the World Series last night. It's an independent entity which estimates the level of viewership. If I were Coke's advertising buyer, I think I'd trust numbers from an outside party rather than CBS when determining how much I'd be willing to pay for my ad. I'm not casting doubt on 144M views in September. I'm just wondering if there is potential in the system for misrepresentation. Part two to the question: If I were long Yahoo or some other portal, and I knew that revenue was dependent upon pagehits, why wouldn't I set up a machine(s) to constantly issue page requests on a 24 by 7 basis? It wouldn't be hard to do and would be a fantastic way to up the numbers. FYI: I jumped the fence from long to short yesterday. I will go long again at some point (hopefully well lower than we are now (100 @12:11pm). Any comments on these questions would be appreciated, Chuck